John Donne
A Garland for John Donne; 1631-1931. Edited by Theodore - Spencer. (Harvard University Press, 1931.- $2.50.)
Tots book has been produced by the Harvard University Press to commemorate the tercentenary of the death of Donne, and the eight essays that it contains display three methods of dealing with the life and work of a man who died three hundred years ago. Three are mainly concerned with the facts of his life or the text of his works, three with his relations with his own contemporary world, and two with his relations with " to-day."
Of the first sort are Mrs. Simpson 's article on Donne's Paradoxes and Problems, Mr. Hayward's On the text of Donne's Sermons, and Mr. Sparrow's on the date of Donne's travels. Of the second sort are Mr. Mario Praz's article on " Donne and the Poetry of Ilis Time," Mr. Spencer's on " Donne and His Age," and Miss Ramsay's on " Donne's Relation to Philosophy." Of the third sort are Mr. T. S. Eliot's article, " Donne in Our Time," and Mr. George Williamson's " Donne and the Poetry of To-day."
The articles of the first sort will appeal chiefly to those to whom a minute knowledge of the life and works of Donne is itself a matter of interest ; but Mr. Hayward's careful analysis of specimens of varying texts of Donne's sermons is interesting also because it throws light on his method of pre: paring and delivering his sermons, and thus, indirectly, illuminates bot h his life and his literary work during his later years. •
Of the other two sets of essays, the second is of a dangerous kind. A centenary celebration .is too often made the oppor- tunity for insisting on, or inventing, resemblances between the works of different ages, and thus investing what could otherwise--so this treatment suggests—be of " merely historical" interest with the creditable attribute of "modern-- ay," This- is Mr. Williamson'S method. Metaphysical poetry," he writes, " springs from the effort to resolve an emotional tension by means of intellectual equivalents which terminate in the senses or possess the quality of sensation." Ile illustrates this ambiguous thesis by comparing Donne with Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Herbert Read, Mr. Crowe Ransom, Miss Elinor Wylie, and the Fugitives of Nashville. Of Miss Wylie he says that "her earlier verse is metaphysical only in the sense in which Housman's poetry is metaphysical "- which is very like saying that it is obscene only in the sense in which Scott's novels are obscene-- and he concludes by observing that " it is suggestive to think of metaphysical poetry as lying between romantic and classical poetry, as the product of an angle of vision in which the subjective and objective- meet " ; " the result," he declares, " is a meta- physic of imaginative form which renders a complex intro- spective emotion by an objective equivalent that is both sensuous and intellectual." What the first of these sentences means I do not kiwis' ; the second expresses, if it expresses anything, the oldest and plainest platitude about writing 0( the " metaphysical " sort. • Too often, as here, the result of such comparisons is to tell us nothing new about either of the authors compared.
Mr. Eliot avoids the dangers of drawing facile parallels between seventeenth and twentieth-century poetry, and asks what it is in Donne that appeals so markedly to many who read and write poetry to-day. In his answer there is nothing that is very new (unless it be his rather low estimate of the literary value of Donne's sermons, and his insistence that Donne deserves chiefly to be remembered as a reformer and preserver of the English tongue) and the course of his thought is not always easy to follow ; but even when his thesis is disputable or diffiettlit, it is worth the consideration that he asks for it. For instance, though it is difficult. to see the relevance to Donne's thought of the quotation from Descartes on p. 11, the consequent discussion of Donne's treatment of " ideas," both in religious thinking and in poetical writing, is the most interesting part of Mr. Eliot's article.
Finally, three essays deal with Donne and his eontem- nqrary world. Miss Rionsay enumerates the philosophical influences to which Donne's inquisitive mind was exposed : mediaeval acholasticismoyhich offered a unified system that aPpented to,Donne'a desire for certainty ; the " new philo-
sophy " with its disintegrating effect upon the beliefs in which he was nurtured ; and Neo-Platonism, which provided an escape from his perplexities of which Donne (whose mind, it is .worth observing, was practically incapable of philosophic thought in the true sense of those words) never availed himself. The attempt to trace, in five thousand words, an immediate effect of these influences in the events of Donne's life and the characteristics of his writings is, as Miss Ramsay disarmingly observes, of necessity a little strained.
Mr. Mario Praz and Mr. Theodore Spencer, the editor of the volume, whose essay closes the collection, both examine in some detail the relations of Donne with contemporary writers. The latter deals with the character of Donne's thought and attitude of mind, and compares it especially with that displayed by his contemporaries in satire and in drains. The former confines himself to Donne's lyrics and religion, sonnets, distinguishing the argumentative and dialecticall strain in his poetry (on which Professor Legouis rightly lays so much emphasis) from the quality of " sensuous thought," and showing how in both characteristics Dunne was anticipated by poets of the Italian Renaissance. The only point which calls for criticism in this most interesting article is the attempt (inspired perhaps by that desire to link old and new above referred to, and justified, according to Mr. Praz, by Mr. Eliot himself) to explain Symbolism as a sort of metaphysical writing, and to confound Donne's " blend of passion and thought-' with that use of ideas not as elements in an in- telligible whole, but as centres of emotional association, which in fact differentiates sharply the " Symbolist " from
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